Xmas Gift=New Book: Chrysler's Turbine Car

[68X426]

Book Review from the Wall Stret Journal on Saturday. Makes a nice xmas gift.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703369704575462133272933798.html?KEYWORDS=don+draper
In case the link doesn't work, here's the article about the book.

Chrysler's Turbine Car By Steve Lehto
Chicago Review Press, 228 pages, $24.95

By PATRICK COOKE

In this automotive age of gutless golf carts shaped by computer ized wind tunnels, it's difficult to imagine a time when the American road thundered with Galaxies, Electras and Rocket 88s. The designs of these 1950s and 1960s iron giants were inspired by the space race and the dawn of jet travel. One car company was even bold enough to put a jet engine in an automobile, and that is the topic of Steve Lehto's "Chrysler's Turbine Car," a delightful history of, as the subtitle has it: "The Rise and Fall of Detroit's Coolest Creation."

The author, a Michigan attorney, has previously written about a mass murder in that state, so it is perhaps apt that he would return to the theme of premature demise. The victim this time is an idea that never achieved the full measure of years it probably deserved.

After years of developing a turbine for automobiles, Chrysler had a model it wanted to promote in the early 1960s and commissioned Ghia, the Italian automotive-design firm, to produce a car body for it.

Turbine engines for aircraft have been around since the German Luftwaffe began experimenting with them in the late 1930s. Unlike internal-combustion piston engines that rely on a complex choreography of mechanical steps to produce energy, the simpler turbine creates powerful thrust by continuously producing hot gasses that exit the engine at very high speeds. Turbines were the bucking broncos of the engine world: loud and hard to control, gulping vast quantities of fuel and air. No one believed they could ever be tamed or made small enough to be practical in an automobile. For one thing, as a senior researcher tells Mr. Lehto, unlike piston engines, "they don't idle worth a damn."

Then along came George Huebner, the book's hero, a charming and slightly egomaniacal Chrysler automotive engineer who would appear, Zelig-like, in photographs of the turbine car over the next 20 years. He persuaded the auto maker to develop the technology as the power plant of the future.

Huebner, who died in 1996 at age 86, believed that there was plenty to recommend the turbine. After all, as Mr. Lehto notes, "the cars ran on any flammable liquid. Not just gasoline but diesel, kerosene, jet fuel, peanut oil, alcohol, tequila, perfume, and many other substances fueled Huebner's turbine cars at one time or another." (The joke went that if a driver ever ran out of fuel he could always dash into a drugstore for a bottle of aftershave.) Turbines weighed less than piston engines, had fewer moving parts and were easy to work on. What's more, they never needed a tuneup or an oil change and could cruise all day at 100 miles per hour.

Mr. Lehto describes how Huebner gathered a crack team of engineers in the early 1950s. Solving the too-big-for-cars problem by scaling down and reconfiguring existing technology, the developers had their first turbine-powered test vehicle ready in 1953. It showed encouraging signs, and several versions followed. By the fourth generation Huebner's engineers found that their turbine car engine could run an amazing 5,000 hours in tests, compared with 3,000 hours for a normal piston engine. The developers seemed to have tamed the beast. In fact, the engine now ran so smoothly that one retired turbine engineer tells the author that a nickel could be placed on its edge, standing on the engine, "and the nickel would stay there." The engine, he said, "was virtually vibration free."

Other car companies tried jumping into the turbine race—without much success. Ford, for example, wedged its version of a turbine into a standard Thunderbird but, so the story goes, it "set fire to the grass and weeds at the side of the road as it roared by."

Mr. Lehto also delves into Chrysler's "user program," a publicity scheme to promote its "jet" car. In 1962, Chrysler commissioned Ghia, the famed Italian automotive-design firm, to handcraft 50 identical car bodies to house the company's latest turbine. Each car would be lent to a family for a few months and then passed on to another. The pretext was "marketing evaluation," but the program's real beauty was in creating buzz. Chrysler received more than 30,000 requests to become test drivers and eventually 203 were chosen.

And, boy, did people love the car. Ghia's prototype design perfectly evoked the rocket vehicle of the future and the hopes of a nation headed to the moon. Just starting the engine must have made drivers feel a bit like astronauts going through a pre-launch sequence—turning on the ignition required eight separate steps. But once the turbine engine was running, it was capable of reaching an astounding 60,000 rpm, as opposed to a piston engine's 8,000 or 9,000. The turbine's normal operating temperature ran at 1,800 degrees Fahrenheit, 10 times the temperature of a piston-engine car of the time. In an interesting aside, Mr. Lehto says that the familiar whine of a turbine jet engine comes not from its fiery core but from gears driving accessories using the engine's power, a sound known as "gear singing."

The author tracks down many participants in Chrysler's user program and records their happy memories. He also pores over stacks of the written reports, filed by the users, detailing the more than one million miles they logged (mostly trouble free) in the 50 Ghia prototypes. None of these test drivers, it seems, was eager to give the car back. "Some wanted a turbine car so badly they sent in blank checks made out to Chrysler," Mr. Lehto writes. "All Chrysler had to do was name the price and deliver a car." More than 18 million visitors viewed the Ghia turbine at the 1964 World's Fair in New York, and the auto maker let more than 350,000 of the visitors take the car for a short ride. Never was a product better poised to take off.

But it didn't. The many reasons why occupy the last third of "Chrysler's Turbine Car." Mr. Lehto outlines the traffic jam of troubles that struck the entire auto industry in the 1970s. The primary culprit was OPEC's 1973 oil embargo and the panicked response of federal regulators, who set unrealistic standards to limit fuel consumption and air pollution. George Huebner pointed out that the Environmental Protection Agency required tailpipe emissions to be cleaner than the ambient air.

What about Chrysler's complicity in the death of its own venture? Mr. Lehto strikes me as too charitable on this front. Yes, turbine engines were expensive to mass produce, as the company said, but the project was also undermined by the years of managerial dithering and bad decision-making that damaged Chrysler generally and led to a federal bailout in 1980. In the end, only a few of the Ghia prototypes survived. Comedian and car enthusiast Jay Leno, who wrote the book's foreword, owns one.

Most of the cars—46 of them—were destroyed in 1967, when Chrysler decided to make sure that competitors couldn't get their hands on anything connected to the abandoned endeavor. Mr. Lehto writes: "Employees of the scrap yard punched holes in the gas tanks, took the fuel out, poured it into the Italian-crafted interiors, and then burned the cars." It was a day when "grown men cried at Chrysler," and the reader may have been tempted to join them.

—Mr. Cooke is a writer in Pelham, N.Y.

[Brock Samson]

 I wonder if there's any mention of the Charger originally being the recipient of that Turbine..